Katie's RV-3 Build Log

Primer Wars

2011-06-12T22:31:00.001-05:00

To prime or not to prime? The war rages in hundreds of internet forum posts, from VAF to Matronics. We choose a simple spray primer, and here's why.

1. A primed part looks finished and clean.
2. When you prep a part for priming, you go over the whole thing with scotch-brite. This helps the primer stick and provides an opportunity to inspect the part and smooth over any scratches and rough edges. You can double check that all holes are free of burrs. I think if you don't prime, its too easy to jump into riveting and overlook the little nicks and scratches that could someday grow into cracks.
3. Even if a part is alclad, the corrosion protection is just on the surface and can be scratched away during cutting, filing and drilling. So primer won't hurt.
4. The smell is great. It's the smell of progress. It's knowing that soon you'll be riveting those parts you spent all that time making!

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2011-06-07T21:03:00.001-05:00

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Back to work- Rear HS spar

2011-06-07T21:02:00.001-05:00

If you need some inspiration to build an RV, just go to an airshow where Team RV is performing. Ben and I went to PDK for their latest show on Saturday. I've been in the garage working a little bit each day since. (Ben installing the air conditioner in the garage helps too.) No drama, just drilled rivet holes for mounting the rudder hinge brackets. Tonight I had to remember how to set the depth of the countersink bit. Ben was working on the GIB's rudder pedals in his -8 but came over to help when he heard me cussing at it. Good thing I set it using scrap metal first, sheesh.

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2011-04-10T18:27:00.001-05:00

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Back to work again! 4 hrs

2011-04-10T18:25:00.001-05:00

Honestly, it took a while to gather the heart to go into the shop and work on the bird. The first time I saw TeamRV fly into KLAL at Sun n Fun, all I wanted to do was go home and remake my VS-307 vertical spar doubler that I messed up a few weeks ago. But the tornado really took a lot out of me. Thinking about my plane just made me think about the images of ruined airplanes that I've been trying hard to forget. Especially Tony Boy II, our friend Tony Spicer's RV-3B. But today it was time to cut some metal. I made a new stab spar doubler, this time measuring the top and trimming the sides before cutting out the lightening wedge. It fits marvelous.

This is my first attempt to post on the blog with my new phone... please excuse any spelling errors, as my Droid thinks its smarter than I am!

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“Congratulations! You’ve finished the first major sub-assembly on your new airplane.”

2011-03-06T13:17:00.002-06:00

I’ve read that sentence at the end of the Horizontal Stabilizer section in the RV-3 assembly manual probably 100 times since acquiring my kit last summer. Now, it’s finally true. There was a time a few months ago when I wondered if I could even get this far, that maybe an airplane like the RV-12 was more in line with my experience and skill level. But honestly, now that I’ve seen what I can do and I’ve felt the “extra” satisfaction that comes with the large amount of fabrication needed in the -3, I’m glad Van’s original design is my chosen path.

Stop laughing, you can’t tell me you’ve never gone out into the workshop in your pajamas.

In addition to the basic fabrication and finishing of parts like measuring, cutting, filing, drilling, deburring, fluting, cleaning, priming and the like, these are a few new skills I learned or practiced while I built my stab. Items marked with * are things I got an extra hand, extra muscle or extra brain power for from Ben. If he’s in the shop when I am, he’s working on his RV-8’s instrument panel, engine rebuild, or some other task. (That's his -8's vertical stab hanging above the work bench.) The good man that he is, he will begrudgingly come over to my half of the garage if I ask him to help hold a piece while I dimple it, or give me an opinion on my craftsmanship, or hand-squeeze a 1/8” rivet. (I will also do the same for him—equally begrudgingly—except for things involving muscles.) He did spend at least half a day engineering and constructing my jig—most woodworking involving materials bigger than 1/8” square balsa is over my head. :-P Anyway, here’s the list:

Build a Jig*

Clamp skins to frame—After trying Van’s way and hating it, I’m audacious enough to think my way was better. :-)

Plot out rivet hole spacing around flutes, hinges, and other pitfalls. Then drill a straight rivet line.

Match drill framework to skin rivet holes without drilling too close to the edge of a piece.

Set up DRDT-2 with enough pre-load to make a distortion-free dimple. (Thank you VAF!)

Dimpling:

Dimple skin with DRDT-2*

Countersink skin in 4 spots to accept rivets

Countersink framework in 12 spots to accept skin dimples

Dimple frame with pneumatic squeezer (bad idea)

Dimple frame with hand squeezer.

Rivet using:

Bucking bar and gun—visual*

Bucking bar and gun—Blind*

Pneumatic squeezer

Hand squeezer (which turned out better than the pneumatic, even with my weak little girl hands)

Difficult Rivets—Interference with structure*
I have several perfectly mis-aligned holes. Meaning, they look wonderful on top of the skin, but are too close to the hinge brackets to be bucked or squeezed properly. We ground down a bucking bar and tried bucking with marginal success. Then ground the squeezer yoke and dies oval-shaped to give them clearance from the hinge brackets with the squeezer. By no means are they perfect, but OK.

Note: When Van says you “may” move the rear spar rivet line slightly aft to make room for the spar doublers, he means you MUST move it aft, and it has to be more than 1/16”!! Especially near the hinge brackets!

Drilled out a few rivets. Surprisingly few. None of the bucked rivets had to be removed; only a few that didn’t squeeze properly.

Now that I have a finished piece of my own on the wall, I can take a break from figuring stuff out and worrying about assembling & riveting, and begin again with some peaceful, brainless fabrication of parts for the Vertical Stab. :-D

A Riveting Tale... (sorry) 10/156 hrs

2011-03-05T13:05:00.000-06:00

I figured it would be best to rivet the stabilizer in the jig. We have the jig, so I might as well use it to make sure everything is straight. After making sure every part was ready, the edges were filed and polished, and no tools were left inside the structure, I clecoed the top side of each skin to the frame. Yes, we would start with the top... Why? Because we could leave the bottom skin completely free to swing up, thus allowing me to see exactly where the bucking bar was. Hopefully, then, by the time we got to the bottom skin, which would need to be riveted blind (not with blind Pop rivets, but without seeing the bucking bar), I would know exactly how the bucking bar feels in my fingers when it's on the rivet. Ben's rule of thumb is to always give the upper surfaces of a low-wing airplane the easiest process and the best chance for a pretty finish (less chance to screw up).

The episode went as flawlessly as I could have ever hoped. Ben ran the gun-- a new U.S. Tools 2X that I bought him for Christmas (knowing full well that I would use it most... heeheehee)-- and I did the bucking. Bucking is a new skill for me-- when Ben needed a hand with the 8 or the 10 tail, I always ran the gun. Manipulating a bucking bar is a bit more difficult, but it's not bad when the rivets are small. For this job, I used a small, rectangular iron bar that fit well inside the small area we had to work with.

The top side went together easily. While I worked hard to get every rivet lookng like a little bronze-colored Oreo cookie on the inside, I didn't know how it looked on the outside until we were all done with the top of the first skin. (The correct proportion of squished-shank length to diameter of a correctly-set solid aluminum rivet looks like an Oreo to me...) I was not disappointed! No proud or literally stuck-up rivets, no dents-- everything was as it should be.

The bottom was a bit more difficult because I had to squeeze my little hand up inside to hold the bucking bar against the rivets going into the front spar, and the aft edge of the tough .032 skin cut into my own skin on the bottom of my forearm. (Good thing I had polished the edge before riveting...) Ben wedged a pair of 2x4 chunks in there to keep pressure off my arm, and that helped a lot. I had to make sure the bar was ALWAYS in contact with the rivet to be pounded when the gun was in operation, or else he would severely damage the outer skin. This required some good, basic, very clear communication:
1. I place the bar behind the hole-- I can see the bar through the hole we are about to rivet. Then I move it back 1/4" or so.
2. He places the rivet in the hole and puts the gun up against it.
3. I place the bucking bar against the rivet. He feels me put pressure on it through the gun. If there is any doubt, I tap the rivet lightly or he feathers the trigger to give one or two very light taps with the gun.
4. I brace the bar against the rivet, confident that it's THE ONE, and yell "GO!"
5. He gives a short burst with the rivet gun. With the 2X gun and 40 psi, it took a burst of just under 2 seconds.
We used a mirror and a flashlight to check the ones we couldn't see. Sometimes they needed a little more, adn then just a very short burst with the gun against the bar would finish the rivet off.

We quit after the first half of the stab for the evening. My hand ached from holding the bucking bar up with my fingers. But today we started again and got the entire left-half of the stab finished pretty quickly.

My next job was to remove the stab from the jig and set it on the work bench on some carpet squares, where I could then set the rivets on the ribs and rear spar. I thought the hardest part was going to be the bucking. The first round of rivets went well. Most of the rib rivets and outer rear spar rivets were easy and rather fun to squeeze. But let me tell you, riveting the rest of this thing was not all roses and moonbeams like I planned. The rear sparline was just a smidge too close to the rear doublers. When Van says you "may" move the aft sparline aft of the flange centerline, he means you MUST move it more than 1/16"! Ben showed me how to tweak the pneumatic squeezer and coax it around the shop heads of the doubler rivets to avoid gouging them or the doublers. Eventually I gave up on the pneumatic and squeezed them all by hand. This hurt after a awhile, but gave much nicer results. Some rivets were too close to the elevator hinge brackets to be dimpled or bucked traditionally-- for these, I countersunk the spar to accept the skin dimples, and Ben ground off the squeezer yoke and flat die into an oval shape to fit next to the hinge brackets. They are ugly on the inside, but still nice looking cosmetically where they will be visible. (My polishing dream is still alive...)

Anyway, this was all finished on Saturday, March 5th. Which leads me to the next blog entry...

Ready to Rivet! 5.5/146 hours

2011-02-25T20:45:00.003-06:00

Well, during the month of February I've managed to fit, trim and drill the left side HS skin (8 hrs), deburr both skins and the skeleton (2 hrs), set up the DRDT-2 dimpler and repair one of its supplemental tables that we broke during the move (1.5 hrs), dimple the skins (2 hrs), and today, dimple the skeleton (5.5).

I owe a lot to the guys on Vans Air Force (VAF) for information on how to properly set up the modern, beautiful, lever-action DRDT-2. I've used it before on my first start at an airplane project, the CX-4. (I was building it with dimpled, flush rivets and using the RV-3 instruction manual to figure out how to build it, so I switched over to the real RV-3 last summer.) Anyway, my CX-4 rudder skin had slightly dished-out dimples, which made the rivets hard to buck without denting the skins and leaving the rivets slightly proud. After examining a P-51 last year at Oshkosh closer than I ever had before, I realized that properly set flush rivets should be exactly that, "flush!" I wondered why my dimples weren't as perfect as the Mustang's. Possum, my tech counselor, said he didn't like the DRDT-2. He preferred the old-school C-Frame, and said that you had to pound each dimple twice on the C-frame to make a perfect dimple. His plane has perfect Lindy-winning dimples, so I couldnt' really argue. Some guys on VAF said the same thing, but others said all you need to do is "preload' the DRDT-2 dimpler to put extra pressure on the skin. Ben has had it for a while, he paid good money for it, and I remember what it was like to pound dimples with a C-frame and a hammer when we built the RV-10 tail. It was loud, jarring work and it was easy to damage skins with a misplaced blow. I love the silent, easy motion of the DRDT-2... so I was very thankful to find out that there is hope for good dimples with it, after all.

You set it up so that the dimple dies touch each other when the lever is all the way down. Then, you crank them together an extra 3/4 turn. This places a lot of pressure on the dies so that it deforms the metal fully according to the shape of the dies. I made up a test strip with 4 holes. The first hole had zero preload, and it looked dishy, similar to the CX4 rudder skin-- which made sense, since I did not set any preload when I dimpled the CX4 skins. The last hole had 3/4 turn, and it was crisp. There was no distortion of the skin outside the immediate area of the dimple. The rivet sat slightly below the surface of the skin, but when I squeezed a test, the rivet came out flush and not proud. Excellent! (Photos will come when i get back to work and upload them off the other camera chip...)

After figuring out the DRDT-2 (without any help from the man, by the way, who was even slightly offended that I would consider his dimple-machine inferior,) and making the best dimples I could have dreamed of in the skins, how hard could it be to make dimples in the skeleton itself?

This was NOT a good way to start! SHIT!! It was like piercing an ear. As I tried to wriggle the pneumatic squeezer into position on the end of the spar, I prematurely bumped the lever. The alligator pressed the dimple die right through the spar flange just OUTSIDE the hole, which you can see just above the die. D'OH! I was just glad it's not in a place to worry about structural strength. It isn't pretty but it won't cause the tail to fall off, since it's on the tip.

I removed the die and gave use of the pneumatic dimpler some additional thought... The jaws are really too big and awkward for these parts. And obviously, a mistake in placement of the dimple die will go unforgiven. So, I switched to the smaller hand squeezer. Ben ground the nose of the yoke flat a long time ago, during construction of the RV-10 tail, for dimpling holes close to spar webs-- which is what I need on this piece, since the spar doublers and rivet shop heads are very close to the rivet line. I continued up the spar line with the hand squeezer... oww... I have little bitch-hands with zero muscle mass, so this hurt, but I got them all done. To make sure the dimples were deep enough, I periodically checked them against a piece of .032 scrap with a dimple made by the DRDT-2 and the Cleaveland dies, and made sure it sat flat inside the skeleton dimple. There were several holes that were too close to the elevator hinges to dimple, so I countersunk those using the same scrap dimple gauge to check depth.

I put on some fuzzy blue gloves to prevent blisters on my hands during the second half of the skeleton-dimpling operation. It worked!

What did I do with the extra-hole monstrosity? I dimpled the "real" hole, which flattened the punched hole, and I will drive an OOPS rivet in there. I'll secure it with a drop of epoxy to keep the rivet from working loose, since the hole is not quite round anymore, and a bit bigger than the 1/8" OOPS rivet will fill. Something to put on the list of anomolies to check during each annual inspection, I suppose... I am glad that it's easily accessible, in case it works loose in the future.

Honey, I'm home... 2.0/127

2011-01-31T21:52:00.000-06:00

So tonight we came home from work, Ben made me dinner, and then he sat down to watch his vampire/werewolf show and I went into the garage to work on my plane. This ain't the 50's anymore, Donna Reed!

Anyway, I got the other skin fitted to the stab frame. I did in one hour what it took 3 weeks to do when I didn't have a clue what to do next! Amazing what a little experience can do.

Progress at Last. 15/125 hours

2011-01-30T19:55:00.001-06:00

I'll admit, I've been a little bit lazy with the blog lately. I've picked at the plane here and there over the past few weeks, but felt increasingly crappy about the project. The stab skins are thick, bulky, heavy, and put up a mental and physical fight with me every time I went into the garage. I made the plywood clamps like Van's specifies a couple weeks ago, but they suck. The skins flopped around and the clamps did not hold them anywhere near their final place, and to make matters worse, I thought I dented the skin with the hard edge of the plywood when I removed the big clamp the last time. Thank God the damn skin is so thick, it survived the blunder. I had an idea to clamp a pair of 2x4s to parallel the front spar, spreading out the clamping force along a straight line instead of over the airfoil shape, but 2x4s are really heavy and I didn't want to twist the skeleton. And who am I to make a jig better than Van? All the frickin woodworking, and visualizing, and plumb-bobbing, and slooooow progress had me wondering whether I even had the skills for this. It didn't help that the RV-12 we are building at work goes together like a kid's jigsaw puzzle, and Possum and Pete are finishing components faster than I can take pictures of it.

Widely-bent .032 skin with the dreadful plywood clamps on the floor beneath the jig

But finally this weekend, I had a sort of breakthrough revelation. Suddenly I told myself:

1. You are not too good for duct tape. The shit's marvelous, and you have a mile of it in your tool box.
2. Don't spend too much time visualizing and pre-planning how you are to do a task. You don't have enough building experience for that yet, so there is a very good chance that your plan won't work, and all the time you spend visualizing is a waste. Get out there, handle the parts and let the airplane help you figure out how to execute each task.
3. Van's instructions are a simple read, but deep in intention. Sometimes it takes several readings over several days before the best way to do a thing sinks in.
4. Use the experience learned from scratch-building the CX4 tail to lead you.
5. You can drill a 3-foot rivet line with variation less than a thin sharpie line wide. That rivet line is not perfect like a pre-punched skin. This airplane is DIFFERENT from every other. It's organic, much like an impressionist painter's brush stroke or a freckled face. Its beauty will be in its character. Do your best to build a clean, straight airplane, but it won't look like a CAD punched premanufactured kit, so quit obsessing over it. Its character is something to embrace, not defeat. It may not win any shows, but that's OK, as long as YOU are proud of it!

With that, I was able to loosen up a bit and free my mind of the fear of screwing up. I was able to take control of the unruly skins by using whatever amount of duct tape I needed to get them in their place. Finally, after the misery of the plywood clamps, I decided to try the 2x4 idea, only using lighter-weight 1x2s. Found some at work in the junk (hee hee, free stuff!) and tried it on Saturday. Took some fiddling & enlarging of the bolt holes to get them to go on easily, but BINGO, they worked like a freakin charm. A long 1/4" carriage bolt in each end made it really easy to get the skin to set down flat along the entire length of the stab, and adjust the tension when necessary. I probably should have put wing nuts on them to make it ridiculously easy to adjust. The best part is, it was entirely my idea. Ben had nothin to do with it!

Skin in place with copious duct tape, 1x2 clamps, and calibrated blocks under the TE.

After initial fitting, I was going to trim the trailing edge to an angle that made the tip rib fit the LE better, but Ben talked me out of it. (again, trust Van's instructions that said NOTHING about trimming the TE, just the ends.) Instead I blocked up the TE by trimming a pair of 2x4 blocks to sit on the jig crosspiece, with the top surface exactly 3/16" below the spar, to allow gravity to give me the required skin overhang aft of the rear spar. (Why fight gravity with clamps when you can harness it?) This set up a baseline location for the skin. Once the skin was clamped in place solidly onto the skeleton, I transferred the locations of the spars and ribs to the skin via sharpie.

One major thing I did change from Van's instructions was that I did not want to drill the rivet holes blindly through the skin, into the skeleton. I've spent WAY too much time on that damn thing to risk running a rivet line off an edge. Plus, my drill control is not quite steady enough to make a straight rivet line in mid-air. Instead, I transferred all the rivet lines and pitfalls like flutes and relief holes onto the insides of the skin. Then, I laid out the rivet spacing, center punched, and drilled the skin on the workbench. After that, it was pretty easy to reclamp the skin to the skeleton and match drill the skeleton to the skin. I may have enlarged the skin holes just a micro bit, but I think it was a good tradeoff, since I ended up drilling nearly perfectly centered and straight rivet lines. :-D I used a #41 bit, so the holes are slightly undersized anyway.

My hand's a little sore from 108 rivet holes per side-- each one center punched, drilled, match drilled and clecoed today. Add that up, -12 builders! :-P

So, I'm happy with it and feeling better about the whole thing. Like maybe it will fly someday...

Crap!! Not done yet.

New Year's Resolution...

2011-01-01T22:13:00.000-06:00

This year, I pledge to work on the plane more and veg on the couch less. This might help a bit:

Ha! Nothing like watching your 2 favorite teams play in the Rose Bowl and working on the plane at the same time!! And NFL Playoffs... and NASCAR... hee hee.

Anyway, while Ben stripped his newly-acquired engine of junk and accessories, I cleaned & primed my forward horizontal stabilizer spar (after buffing out that horrible score mark from the brake) and then pre-drilled two holes in each outboard end for the end rib rivets. We took half an hour set up the air compressor in its temporary location, and then I went to work riveting. It took a few head scratches from both of us to remember that you need 80 lbs on the regulator to squeeze 1/8" rivets, however after I screwed up 2 and drilled them out, we turned up the air and I finished what I could reach with the pneumatic squeezer. I drilled 2 more rivet holes in the upper row near the centerline of HS-308 to replace the single rivet shown on the plan. I guess Van had a one-piece front spar web at one point, because a single rivet between two butting sides of the spar web won't do much of anything. Those holes couldn't be reached with the pneumatic so the man came over and squeezed them by hand. The hand squeezer has a longer yoke.

Then I set up my two center nose ribs. First I set the stab skin on the jig table and set the center ribs in place between the spars, making sure they were parallel to the inside edge of the skin to get the proper angle. I fluted and filed one of them, tweaked the flange til it sat in line with its its center rib partner, and clamped it in place. I tweaked the flange of the other one, clamped it in place, then measured between the two forward ends. Exactly 8.5" as drawn on the plans. Yippee!

Christmas Break-- 15 hrs

2010-12-29T21:46:00.000-06:00

Back at it again, finally! We spent last weekend organizing the garage, building workbenches, repurposing old cabinetry, building a tail jig, and getting Cruella from the airport. The garage looks spacious now that all the crap is put away.

Stopping for 5 months and then starting again is tough. Even for small, simple parts like the tail feathers. Throw in some carpentry, and suddenly there is a huge potential for frustration. This weekend was frustrating just because every single thing I did, I had to figure out how to do it. I don't know what I'd do without Ben and his ideas. Wait, yes I do. I'd have sold the -3 project and bought a pre-punched, idiot-proof RV-12 tail instead!!!

Garage Before...

Workshop After!!

Tail jig. Anchored to floor with concrete anchors and level in all dimensions (or at least as level as organic wood can be). HS structure bolted to the jig using several brackets made from aluminum angle.

Break time... Got to sit in Ben's RV-8 "Cruella" (who, incidentally, was being a bitch that day)

Front HS spar clamped in place and ready for match drilling.

OOPS... When bending .062 plate on the brake, make sure you cover the sharp edge with tape first. I will need to buff this score mark out, since this piece ties the HS to the VS and will be under pretty significant flight loads. NOT a good place for fatigue cracks!

No More Excuses!

2010-12-20T12:50:00.001-06:00

Got out in the garage this weekend and made the transition from Junk Staging Area to Workshop, complete with new jig for the horizontal tail! Ben is my hero. We just need to get the power tools set up and his RV-8 fuselage in here, and building will commence.

Still alive, but...

2010-11-17T10:30:00.000-06:00

It's been a long couple of months without working on my plane. Moving, cleaning 2 houses, fixing the old house, moving... moving some more... fixing the new house... and now we have to squish two airplane projects and all the tools into half of a 2-car garage. NOT going to be easy. I'm tempted to bring pieces of my 3 into my spare bedroom/model airplane workshop... I wonder how bad aluminum shavings might scuff up the bamboo floor?? *evil laugh* The new house is wonderful and the new, bigger workshop will be wonderful when it's built. I literally can't wait.

Last Steps Before The Jig-- 2.0

2010-09-19T17:50:00.000-05:00

Spent about 2 hours today gussetting the end ribs to a 90-degree angle and aligning the HS-302 front spar webs. I sandwiched the webs between a piece of .062 scrap plate and an angle in the vise to make the 8-degree sweep bend. (The bend was so close to the edges of the upper and lower flanges, there was no room for the brake or hand seamer to do the job.)

Next step: I want to build the jig before continuing any further. This will assure the main spar stays straight, end ribs stay square, and all will align correctly before riveting the forward spar together.

Plucked from Time's Dusty Grasp

2010-09-19T17:19:00.000-05:00

Google is wonderful. So is Facebook.

A Google search led me straight to Rob Mixon, the man who ordered the finish kit from Van's Aircraft in very early 1982. This name was written in magic marker on the canopy box, along with a Miami address. Google found him because he's a CFI in Florida with his own website-- he has even written a few books about flying! Knowing this, I typed his name in the Facebook search, just for the hell of it. POOF, there he was. I sent him a message, and heard back from him quickly. He does remember he ordered an RV-3 kit a looooong time ago, but sold it when he opened the box and saw "the huge pile of aluminum!" He did not remember the serial number, but I gave him the link to this blog, in case he's curious & wants to keep tabs on the progress of his old "pile."

Next lead: Richard Alshouse, Sr., the man who bought it from Mr. Mixon, and passed away in 2008, leaving the kit to his daughter to sell. JoEllen Alshouse Reed is also a CFI. On a whim, I typed her name into Facebook, and POOF! There she was! She reported that she couldn't find any plans or paperwork in her father's estate, but if anything surfaces, she'll let me know. She said the kit parts spent many, many years in her father's loft above his hangar in Ocala. (Think how many RV's flew over it on the way to Sun 'n' Fun over the years... hell I've probably flown over it!)

So, this morning I sat with all leads exhausted. I really wanted to know the true identity of my airplane. I don't know why... It's the same sort of joy I felt when I cleaned the decades-old oily crust off of the engine block of that old Farmall Regular I helped fix up in high school and found the serial number which dated it back to 1926. Historical curiosity is just an unusual source of nerdy joy that's always lived deep within me. I don't need a serial number to register the airplane, since I can follow in Mr. Tony Bingelis's footsteps and register it as a K1. (B9 is 74TX's registered s/n-- the 9th, and final, airplane built by Bingelis.) Or, I can use my new tail kit's number, although that number will imply a kit birthdate of 2008, and -3B wing spars.

Today I tried one last thing. Bored & absently watching football on TV, I typed RV-3 into the FAA registry database. Several pages into the alphabetical listings, I found it-- Robert Mixon, RV-3. WHOA! Clicked on the link, and a warning message popped up. "This aircraft's registration status may not be suitable for operation. CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION." And POOF! There it was. RV-3 Serial Number 898. It even had its own N-number-- N39445. No dates of manufacture or airworthiness, obviously. Sale reported to Richard Alshouse. Yep, this has to be it!

So, what now?? Now I have a definitive number to send to Van's. I can update this kit's record with them. Rob Mixon is listed as the manufacturer with the feds, so this might be an issue. But, really it won't be. My plane will not be an RV-3. It will be, at very least, an RV-3A. So this FAA record shouldn't apply to my airplane when I register it. Like an adopted child who finds out his biological identity, my plane is no longer lost to time & mystery.

Forward HS spars-- 3.5/66.5

2010-09-12T16:38:00.001-05:00

Cut the notches out of the flanges on the HS-302 front HS spars. This was fun, it included drilling a hole for the radiused corners of the cut, cutting with tin snips and band saw, changing the blade on the band saw, filing, scotchbriting, and bending the outboard end flanges. Before going inside to watch my beloved Packers play the Eagles (a rare opportunity here in Tennessee), I set the pieces all together on the bench. Once the bends are made in HS-308 splice plate, I can put the front spar together and get ready for skins. Yippee!

Decisions, Progress, First Boo-Boo 5/63

2010-09-11T18:36:00.003-05:00

I woke up thinking about wing spars this morning. No idea why. I reviewed the Change Notice 1 paperwork and went to the shop to study my stack of ribs. The root rib is made of .032, which tells me it was made after September 1980. (Root ribs prior to that date were .020.) Change Notice 1 was issued to reinforce the root rib and rear spar attach area after 3 or 4 RV-3's were lost to wing failures between 1978 and 1980. Within this change notice, there are several different options for fixing the root rib, based on the completion level and vintage of the aircraft in question. Change Notice 2 was issued to reinforce the main spar. Both Change Notices must be done in order for the aircraft to be approved for aerobatics. There are two different Change Notice 2's, based on which type of spar you have, Type 1 (pre-1984, 1/8" spar cap lamination bars) or Type II (Post-1984 with 3/16" spar cap laminations). If you have read this far, you might be getting confused. Well join the damn club, because it is not quite so easy as ordering the parts and just doing it, like I thought I could do when we started this project. It will cost me $800 and many weeks to order the bar stock for the spar caps and build a Type II spar. It would cost me $2600 to order shiny, new, machined RV-3B spars, and zero build time, and I'd get a modern F-303 bulkhead assembly match-drilled to the spars. Hmmmm..... This is starting to seriously become an option!

I knew that annoying hole in the table was good for something.

Anyway, after sitting there a while I decided to actually do something. I fluted and squared the HS-305 ribs and drilled them to the spar, making sure the rib was flush with the top of the spar. (The rib was slightly smaller than the spar.) Then I made two HS-308 front spar/Vertical Stab Spar joiner plates. TWO, you say?? Yep. Got a little overzealous with the band saw, took too much out of the inner radius of the upside-down T-shape, so I scrapped it and made another one. I sure hope that's why Van's provided a piece of plate that was twice as big as what I needed...

Notice there are rivets between these ribs. Eventually I'll need to drill some or all of them out to make room for the Horizontal Stab mounting bars. Figure I'll just leave them in for now & cross that bridge later. MUCH later.

In the ruler picture, this is showing how the rib is flush to the top of the spar. The other rib is just as flush even though it doesn't look like it here. I like small victories. :-)

Radius cut too sharp. Damn.

Much Better!

HS Spar & Ribs... 5.5/58

2010-09-05T18:19:00.001-05:00

My little problem hole...

First thing today was to rivet the hinge brackets onto the spar. Ben was out mowing the lawn at the new house today, so I was on my own. Set up the pneumatic squeezer, determined how many washers to put under each of the rivet sets, and gave it a shot. It squeezed the first rivet down pretty well, but not quite far enough. One more small washer, and poof. I only had one that I had to drill out. It laid over sideways for undetermined reasons... probably didn't help that the hole was a little oblong to begin with, because it was drilled before we came up with the awesome angle jig yesterday... So I drilled through the head, and that came off ok, but the rivet was really jammed in the bracket, so the subsequent hammer-punching stressed the web against the cleco in the other hole and puckered it. I had to smooth a piece of wood and hammer it back flat, then deburr the edge of the hole, re-prime, and then the bracket sat flat against the surface again. (Whew.)

After lunch, I prepped the HS stab ribs. Good God, I still can't get over how rough these parts are! Looks like whoever cut the parts out was either drunk, or having a really bad day with the band saw, or whatever the used to cut out the blanks. The belt sander worked really well for smoothing the flange edges straight. The ribs were filed, fluted, and bent square, then clamped & drilled to the spar. The plans say to rivet them in place, but I will wait til after the skins are drilled. I'm not planning on "blind drilling" the skins to the skeleton as Van suggests.... that would just be way too scary!

Vacation time! Finishing HS spar... 7/52.5

2010-09-04T18:27:00.001-05:00

Been a long time since I worked on the 3, but this weekend I'm on vacation. We started the morning by vaccuuming spiders & webs off the planes. :-P

Note pink dots on hinge brackets--
that's the laser!

After a short time reviewing the instruction manual, I decided to drill out the AN3 hinge bolt holes on the elevator hinge brackets to full size. I used 3/16" pop rivets with the mandrels pulled out as a spacer for the center of the holes, so that I could run a taught string through them to make sure they are all aligned along the hinge line. I redrew all of the centerlines and remeasured the positions of the hinge brackets, then set them all in place to check alignment. For giggles, I tried a laser pointer first. With minor tweaking, the laser went right through to the other end of the spar!

Ben suggested using the machinist's protractor to jig the brackets in place while drilling. We set it up for about 91 degrees. It didn't take much of an angle, but worked out perfectly. I was able to clamp the protractor to the spar flange, and rest the brackets against it at just the right angle to be perpendicular to the spar spanwise centerline.

Once one side of each pair was drilled & clecoed to the spar, I bolted the hinge bearings in place along with one thin large-area washer between the brackets. This made it easy to drill the other half of the hinge bracket pair to the spar. Then I drilled the #40 holes out to #30, and then #12 for the center bracket.

Machinist's protractor clamped in place to set angle of bracket

Deburring was standard, but chasing the chips out that had lodged between the spar doublers and flange was a challenge. I did such a good job filing the edge of the doublers and getting a tight fit, the chip-chaser I bought from Avery was too thick! Had to use the Exacto knife to get the chips out carefully, without scratching the spar flange.

Finally, the last step of the day was to clean & prime all of the brackets and shoot one clean-up coat of primer on the rear face of the spar to cover up all the new dings.

Using the hinge bearing to space the hinge brackets

So Sad!

2010-08-19T21:01:00.000-05:00

Just thought I'd throw an update up here. It's been a really busy month with Oshkosh & work, and now we're in the process of fixing up the house to sell it so we can move to the new house. Exciting, but sad, becaus the spiders have overtaken Cruella and my poor RV-3!! It may be a while, but we'll be back to work eventually...

Back to work! 7/45.5

2010-07-17T21:14:00.001-05:00

It's been a while since I looked at the bones of my horizontal stab. So long, in fact, that when I tiptoed the trail around the left wing and nose of Cruella, who takes up most of the garage, I walked through cobwebs... EEWW. It was just one of those weeks where work was long and I kept forgetting to buy a new bandsaw blade.... cold beer & TV won the war most evenings.

Today I finished making the elevator hinge brackets. FINALLY. New bandsaw blade is WONDERFUL, like a hot spoon through ice cream. Also riveted HS-309, the center bracket pair, together with their sandwiched bearing. Drilling that proved to be more of a challenge than I expected. The center hole was pretty easy-- I drilled a 1/8" hole in the center, then enlarged it to 3/4" using 2 different Uni-Bits. I did not know how easy it is to move a hole one way or the other with a uni-bit... my pilot holes were perfectly aligned with each other, but by the time the big hole was finished, they were off by 1/32". It was annoying, but not enough of an error to cause any problems. Then, after deburring the holes thoroughly, I slid the bearing in place, clamped it to one bracket with a Vise-Grip, and drilled the rivet holes by placing the piece on the edge of the drill press table, which was angled off to one side.

I think there should be an EAA SportAir workshop called "Creative Clamping & Drilling," because I need some work in that area. Ben helped out a little here. The flanges of the bracket assembly had to be clamped to a flat surface to assure their alignment and perfect fit with the spar surface, so traditional vertical drilling was tough to do. (although now that I think about it, I could have clamped them to a piece of angle instead of the workbench... oh well.) While I match drilled the second bracket to the bearing and the first bracket, I used a couple of rivets in the holes to make sure the bearing stayed aligned with the drilled bracket. (that was my idea.) Then, to make sure the brackets both sat flat, we clamped them to the solid work table with a long-reach welding clamp and used the long drill bit for the holes on the bottom that were too close to the table to reach with the drill and short bit. It was weird because I'm not used to drilling parallel to the ground, and I wanted to make sure the holes were drilled straight. To make sure I had the 12" bit parallel to the table, Ben showed me how to use your free hand as a gauge for drill bit height above the work surface. If I placed my hand so that the bit was just above the fingernail close to the work, then slid my hand back toward the drill and put the bit in the same relative height above the same fingernail, I knew the bit was parallel to the table. But then, as I applied pressure to the drill, it bowed the bit a little, so I have to watch out for that.

I figure by the time this plane is done, I will be able to teach "Creative Clamping and Drilling" myself.

Next, I laid out the brackets on the spar. I drilled a 1/16" pilot hole for the eventual AN3 bolt holes so that I could stretch a piece of string through there to get all of the brackets lined up along the spar centerline. This will assure a straight hinge line with no binding, if it all works as planned...

First Tool Casualty-- 1.5/38.5

2010-07-11T18:24:00.000-05:00

Spent most of the day taking a break for some NASCAR Truck action, laundry, dishes, and other things a good "spousal-equivalent" should do-- (Ben's sister came up with that one, pretty good, huh?) Then went out to make some more hinge brackets. Finished one outboard bracket before jamming up the bandsaw and putting a kink in the blade. :-(

More Hinge Brackets & A Potential Disaster-- 4.5/37

2010-07-10T19:36:00.001-05:00

Title says it all-- I cut 4 more elevator hinge brackets (HS-310) out of that big hunk of angle stock, cut, smoothed and scotch-brited. Actually 5 if you include the one I screwed up on the band saw, which was an angry SOB today for some reason. It has a new blade, but it started loading up with aluminum and giving us fits.

Saw some new photos of another builder's tail-- Louise Hose and Paul Dye are building a 3B. Their HS rear spar has flush rivets in the center to allow for the stabilizer mounting bars that attach to F-310-- and Ben and I said OH S***. Nothing was mentioned in the plans about this, but as Paul pointed out on the VAF forum, you have to think ahead thoroughly on every step and mentally put each piece together first to catch the many "gotcha's" on the plans. I worried for a while about having enough edge distance between the mount bolt holes and the extra rivet holes that I should not have drilled, but we figure we can widen and adjust the mount bars to either use or miss the rivet holes.

Shop Talk for the day...
Ben fitted his wing fairings on Cruella, his RV-8, today. As he laid there under the plane, he said "This makes me wanna barf!"
"What happened now?" I said, looking up from filing my piece of angle.
"This fits PERFECTLY!!" He just stared at his pre-drilled fairing in awe. The predrilled holes in the fairings that came in the kit lined up perfectly with the holes in the wing, which is a small miracle considering there are 3 pieces of wing skin under the fairings.
"Well you should be happy then," I said as I filed some material off the edges of my made-from-scratch hinge brackets and thought of the many thousands of hours ahead of me creating parts from raw stock. "That makes ME wanna barf!!"

Elevator Hinge Brackets, Round 1-- 2/32.5

2010-07-09T19:26:00.001-05:00

Fabricated a pair of HS-309 center elevator hinge bearing brackets out of 6061 angle stock using the band saw, disc sander, files and Scotch-Brite (in that order!) Had a little Fat Tire to go with it...

A Riveting Experience. (ha ha ha) 1.5/30.5

2010-07-08T21:05:00.000-05:00

Ben showed me how to set up the pneumatic rivet squeezer today. I've used it before, but never on a piece with so much length and mass. We started out clamping the squeezer to the work table and standing the spar up, but it was too awkward to handle with all the weight of the clecos, so we laid the spar down and freehanded the squeezer. Ben did the first rivet to see how it worked, and then turned me loose. They turned out pretty well-- no smileys, no lean-overs. A nice couple rows of Double-Stuffed Oreos on the shop head side!!!

Primed & ready 1.5/29

2010-07-07T20:38:00.000-05:00

Finished smoothing the edges of the HS-307 doublers on the comby wheel (Scotch-brite wheel on the drill press). Ben adjusted it for me so it would turn a higher RPM, which helped get most of the file marks out. Deburred, Scotch-brited, cleaned, and primed all spar pieces. Ready to rivet!

Match-drill HS-307's 1.5/27.5

2010-07-06T20:45:00.001-05:00

Match-drilled the HS-307 horizontal stabilizer spar doublers to the spar web this evening. The holes are pretty damn straight! The doublers are deburred, but need more surface smoothing to remove the aggressive file marks.

Rear Stab Spar 6/26

2010-07-05T20:09:00.002-05:00

I finished filing the edges of the HS-307 rear spar doublers this morning. Filing is fun for the first 4 or 5 hours, and then a person starts to go a little insane. Once the doublers fit alright, I measured out the rivet spacing, allowing for the elevator hinge brackets and the inboard rib. Van's instructions specifically say "Triple Check your drill template." I double, triple, quad checked the thing because after all that damn FILING... well let's just say all I could think was "DON'T F*@# IT UP." Finally marked & drilled the rivet holes on the drill press and as far as I can see they are all OK. About a third of the day was spent helping Ben set his flaps-- Cruella is finally looking like an airplane!

"Women's-Work" Word of the Day: FILING 8/20

2010-07-04T21:54:00.000-05:00

I figured today would be easy. Make a couple of aluminum doublers for the rear Horizontal Stab spar, prep the spar web/flange, and put it together. Well, it was "easy" in that it didnt' take much brain power, but holy cow. Between the initial filing and shaping it to fit the within the bend radius of the flange, I spent about 6 hours doing nothing but filing, and I'm still only mostly done with the upper doubler! My upper arms and chest muscles are screaming at me already. (If this continues I may get rid of my Lunch-Lady arm flab, so NOT complaining!)

The photos show the HS kit before I started, with Ben's RV-10 and RV-8 horizontal stabs hanging on the wall. (Ben's 10 stab is the first "real" airplane project I ever worked on.) The next photo is the raw bar stock before I cut out the doublers. The last photo shows the upper doubler almost filed to shape... it will have to wait til morning. Notice the laid-out strip of belt sand paper I screwed to the table for use as a "sanding block."

Cruella gets her wings!- 3/12

2010-07-03T21:21:00.001-05:00

First, a little window to my world. I didn't get much done on the -3 today, but that's OK because I helped Ben mount the wings on his RV-8, named Cruella, for the first time. It's an airplane we picked up mostly complete back at Christmas time. The builder didn't exactly take his time with it, so Ben has spent the last 6 months doing a lot of rework to make it right. Today's wing-mounting session was hard on everyone but the guys finally got the job done. I served as Chief Gopher for tools, moving wing racks & supports, and literally crawling around the shop watching, spotting and measuring. Here's a shot of the Stooges themselves, from the left- Mark "Possum" Phillips, our coworker and Tech Counselor/RV guru, Ben, my boyfriend, and Mark Stauffer, also our co-worker and EAA chapter prez. These guys are great friends and make quite a team for these Manpower Moments. (or Hours, as today turned out.)

I finished up organizing the hardware and the tail kit this afternoon and spent a good bit of time studying the plans, instructions and spar change notices. While I wait on bar stock for spar caps (84 feet of it!!) and round up missing sheets of wing & fuselage plans, I've decided to start on the tail. With Ben and I moving to a bigger house in September, we don't need to be setting up and taking down elaborate wing or fuselage jigs til we get over there anyway. Might as well ease into this project with the easy stuff...

I have a 16 oz can of Red Bull in the fridge with my name on it. Tomorrow will be fun.

More Clues: Wing Plans From Van's Dust Bin 1.5/9

2010-07-02T22:18:00.000-05:00

The one major item missing from my pile-o-parts is the plans. Ben talked with some folks at Van's last week and they managed to scrounge up some old plans for the -3. (The lady over there said, "Make sure she knows they are old-- REALLY old!") Apparently they are whatever they could find from the 80s. The good news is, they showed up in the mail today along with drawings, photos and instructions for both change notices for the wing spars. Woo hoo! And, I finally have written instructions on how to build the spars. (Van's old typewriter-pounded instructions. Neat.) The problem is, Drawings 4 and 5 of the wing plan sheets are still missing. So, I don't know all of the details about how to build the spars yet. The plans I do have are from 1984, which means they are the Type II spars. Even though my spar webs are Type I vintage, I'll probably build the Type II wings which feature thicker spar cap laminations. Someone stole the useful aluminum angle and bar stock out of the kit anyway, so no biggie.

Little Brown Packages- 2.5/7.5

2010-07-01T20:47:00.003-05:00

Spent a couple hours after work going through the famed little brown paper bags labeled with Sharpie marker. Unfortunately most of the bags are really old and fell apart in my hands, but some are still intact. I might save a few for posterity. Organized all the AN hardware in a plastic tray and made a list of all the rivets. Of course the rivet bags all had holes in them...

Counting & sorting nuts gave me flashbacks of Kindergarten. Look Mr. Hanson, wherever you are, I'm building a plane!!

Inventory- 5/5

2010-06-27T23:20:00.000-05:00

Today I spent about 5 hours opening boxes and laying out parts. I'll have some old documentation and wing plans from Vans sometime this week, so today I focused on the fuselage parts.

Some notable things:
1. The large formers are all in two pieces split down the vertical centerline.
2. They have long squiggly stiffening indentations up the sides that look as if they're done with an English wheel.
3. All the parts appear to be hand made, or at least hand-cut.
4. The brakes are wrapped in newspaper from December, 1981... "The Oregonian"
5. Mark found a classified ad in the brake wrappings for an original Les Paul guitar for $600! (He about fainted after finding that one.)
6. Some parts are marked with descriptions in blue sharpie... strangely reminiscent of Van's comment on marking parts in Section 5...
7. Looks like all major fuselage parts are there except for the rear two formers and the ones you have to fabricate. Longerons are missing, however.
8. The canopy box is marked with a return address from Van's Aircraft written in marker from Cornelius, OR.

The Decision

2010-06-27T18:58:00.000-05:00

I had fun over the past year working on my "old" project, a scratch-built Thatcher CX4, but every completed step led to the thought "OK, how will I pay for -- ." The airframe is supposed to cost about $8000 to build, and then there's engine, avionics, and all that. I hate pop rivets, so my CX4 rudder was built using dimpled flush solid rivets. It turned out quite nice, if I may brag a little, so the plan was to build the entire plane with them. I also wanted to add a small baggage compartment and a roll bar, along with a Jabiru engine instead of the recommended VW. I probably pissed a bunch of people off on the CX4 Yahoo group because I was always trying to change their "perfect" airplane, but I don't care who you are, no plane is perfect. I was almost out of tail material and wondering how to pay for the next step, the wing spars.

One night a few weeks ago my boyfriend Ben, who gave me CX4 plans for my birthday almost exactly one year ago, found an RV-3 kit on Barnstormers.com. It was largely untouched and available for less than half the cost of the materials I would need to purchase for the rest of the CX4 airframe. He suggested hopping over the fence and into the RV fold, of which he is a member... and every other homebuilder I know. I laughed. Sure, it's a great deal, and the -3 has all the features I love about airplanes and planned to build into the CX4, it's a proven design of nearly 40 years, AND it's aerobatic-- I absolutely loved the idea-- but how in the hell could I afford that?? Well... his dusty motorcycle went on CraigsList the next day, and guess what? I am now custodian of a 30 year old RV-3 in the box. I now have almost every airframe part I'll need to build my own airplane. Happy Birthday to Me! (and Christmas, and Valentines...) I love this man.

Anyway. Last Saturday, we drove 2 hours to go look at it along with our RV-6A/7A builder-guru-technical counselor, Possum. (Yes, I said "Possum." It's a long story.) We all agreed that it was pretty much complete and in good shape, and so we agreed on a deal with the owner. Yesterday, we filled the back of the truck and trailer with all the parts and hauled my new-old project home.

The owner had originally purchased a new tail kit with the intent of building the entire plane from new kits, but found this project and bought it instead. Now, he has found a flying 3 so he doesn't need the kit. Anyway, I ended up with a finished original tail in airworthy but sort of ugly shape, a new tail kit in the box, finished but beat-up flaps and ailerons, and a bunch of untouched aluminum, fiberglass and hardware begging to be unpacked.

This blog will hopefully serve as a builder log as well as a little portal for friends, family and other RV-3 builders to see photos & methods as I figure this little plane out. Each entry will have a number in the title signifying hours spent for this entry/total hours spent on the project.

I'm surrounded by friends with boundless homebuilding knowledge and wonderful tools they're willing to let me learn and use. The morning we picked up my kit, a friend of ours who owns an RV-3 let me sit in his plane. It was the first time I've ever sat in a 3 and it fit like a little fighter-plane should! The best part-- this particular RV-3, N74TX, is the last airplane that Tony Bingelis built. What a way to start this adventure!